Okay, but even leaving aside the pain stuff, people generally find subjectivity / consciousness to have inherent value, and by extent are sad if a person dies even if they didn't (subjectively) suffer.

I would not personally consider the death of a sentient being with decades of experiences a neutral event, even if the being had been programmed to not have a capacity for suffering.

I think the idea of there being a difference between an ant dying (or "disapearing" if that's less loaded) vs a duck dying makes sense to most people (and is broadly shared) even if they don't have a completely fleshed out system of when something gets moral consideration.

Sure, because you’re a human. We have social attachment to other humans and we mourn their passing, that’s built into the fabric of what we are. But that has nothing to do with whoever has passed away, it’s about us and how we feel about it.

It’s also about how we think about death. It’s weird in that being dead probably isn’t like anything at all, but we fear it, and I guess we project that fear onto the death of other entities.

I guess my value system says that being dead is less bad than being alive and suffering badly.